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Susumu Yokota





Skintone Edition












Volume 1








Yokota's startling debut release on the Skintone label is full of mystery and wonder. It mixes his love of deep house beats, eclectic ambience, and sampladelic oddity.

Listen


Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.

Listen


Yokota's ambient masterpiece that set the world alight with it's dazzling and immersive transcendent beauty.

Listen


One of Yokota's most loved releases that explores the intersection of jazz, new age ambience and a world of found sound and samples.

Listen



Yokota's most upbeat and playful release on the Skintone label. A wild melange of bumping beats, freestyle samples and esoteric goodness.

Listen

Yokota at his most enigmatic and profound. A deeply psychedelic voyage into a world of ritual and magic.

Listen


The mystical world of Laputa is perhaps Yokota's most challenging work but immeasurably rewarding. Beguiling and bewitching in equal measure.



Skintone

IIn the late 1990s Susumu Yokota became increasingly sensitive to the changing environment of the Tokyo dance music scene. As the underground continued to grow he found himself playing to larger audiences, drawn away from the more comfortable intimacy of earlier experiences. Despite domestic acclaim, the expectation to continue within the confines of genre was starting to prove problematic to him.

Yokota was something of a polymath; trained as an economist, working as a graphic designer, established as a musician. His influences were wide and varied. Never entirely at ease with being considered solely a house music producer, his approach to creating was always an experimental one.

He often cited Sawaragi Noi as a key influence. Sawaragi had defined the development of Japanese pop culture as a process of ‘destruction and reconstruction’ of western influences, and it was this concept that inspired Yokota throughout his career. Developing a channel for his creative endeavours was therefore a natural and necessary step for him, and Skintone was to become the umbrella under which he could explore and expand.







Volume 2






Regarded by Yokota as his masterpiece and rightly so. An endlessly inventive mixture of classical and contemporary forms.

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Without doubt one of Yokota's most beautiful and easily accessible productions. Haunting, majestic and timeless.

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Yokota at his most adventurous and sprawling and enchanting featuring an array of guest vocalists. A treasure chest of musical marvels.

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An overlooked classic in the Yokota canon with elements of shoegaze, blissed out lo-fi electronica and smudged new age fantasy.

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Yokota's most intriguing album featuring some of his most beautiful and enduring compostions.


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The longest album in the Yokota catalogue and arguably the deepest. Endlessly inventive and wondrous. Yokota at the height of his powers.

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An album that covers all Yokota's favourite bases from deep immersive ambience to rolling breaks, deep house and sampladelic experimentalism.

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The Leaf Label and Lo Recordings.

Leaf and Lo were both formed in 1995. Their respective founders Tony Morley and Jon Tye collaborated and exchanged music regularly, operating as they did from parallel emerging musical platforms. The two also came together to run the experimental Scratch Club night in Spitalfields, East London, along with Rob Young from The Wire.    Tony Morley discovered Susumu Yokota’s work and instantly recognized him as an important new voice. Leaf re-released ‘Image 1993-1998’ a year after the Japanese release and continued to put out the Skintone albums to great acclaim, positioning Yokota as a leading artist in the blossoming ambient scene. This relationship continued until they parted ways prior to ‘Symbol’.    Yokota had previously worked with Lo Recordings, having collaborated with Rothko on the ‘Waters Edge’ EP in 2002, and was a fan of the label. When The Leaf Label opted not to take on ‘Symbol’, Yokota approached Lo.    Lo Recordings began the arduous task of clearing samples for the album and the following year ‘Symbol’ was released. The album became one of Yokota’s most successful, forging a relationship that saw Lo Recordings putting out all subsequent Skintone albums.Design

The Skintone reissue project has been designed by the partnership of Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn under their creative moniker Non Format. The designers have worked closely with Lo Recordings for thirty years. Although the pair now head up the Nordic design team ANTI they still find time to nurture the portfolio they have generated through Lo’s roster.

    For the Skintone project Non Format have gently abstracted Yokota’s original designs and placed them full square and central to the reworked sleeves. Nine new fonts have also been struck to combine and contrast across the fourteen albums.

Audio Mastering

Mark Beazley has remastered the entire Skintone collection. A founder member of Rothko, whose debut albums were released on Lo Recordings, Mark was an early fan of Yokota’s debut ambient work ‘Magic Thread’.

    Lo and Leaf were jointly curating The Scratch Club in Spitalfields at this time and a collaboration between Rothko and Susumu Yokota was suggested. The resultant EP, ‘Waters Edge’ ,became Yokota’s first release on Lo Recordings. The project led to a full length collaborative album, ‘Distant Sounds of Summer’ which was released through Lo in 2005.

    In Mark’s words: “It has been a real honour to revisit and master all of Yokota’s work over the last months. To concentrate on his sound world in such detail was a revelation. The breadth of his emotional landscape is tangible throughout his music.  At times leading to some dark places and then back out into the light. He was a great artist, I am so very proud to have worked with him.”



MAGIC THREAD





Volume 1 – Album 1




“Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.”
– Susumu Yokota, 1998.


Yokota’s startling debut release on the Skintone label. Full of mystery and wonder, mixing his love of deep house beats, eclectic ambience and sampladelic oddysey.



A1: Weave   
A2: Reflux   
A3: Unravel

B1: Circular   
B2: Spool   
B3: Fiber

C1: Potential  
 C2: Metabolic

D1: Stitch  
 D2: Blend   
D3: Melt




Including an essay from Ken Hollings in the liner notes....

‘... The smoothness and roundness of the thread are signs of its efficiency. One of the earliest pieces of functioning machinery in existence, its magic lies in the unseen changes it brings about — unseen at the time of their making, that is....’









Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota's deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label, written during one of the happiest and most productive periods of his career. The sprawling LP incorporates the dubby, washy 00s leftfield house and techno soundscapes he’d been soaking in at his low-key ‘Skintone’ residents’ party at club LUST in Tokyo’s Ebisu district, as well as a vast array of psychedelic field recordings and organic sonic abstractions. It is perhaps the quiet feeling of connection and community which Yokota was feeling at the time which gives Magic Thread its air of warmth and playfulness; even the title is a utopian idiom of togetherness. It also, however, retains a distinct aura of creeping mystery and windswept isolationism, hinting at his output to come.

Intended initially for a Japanese market, Magic Thread came out on a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies, heralding the birth of Yokota’s imprint for his more experimental, introspective, and wide reaching productions. 
 Unlike his later, more cinematic efforts, however, it retains a strong foot in the techno sphere, with tracks like ‘Reflux’ and ‘Potential’ flying close to the shuffling, pared-back proto-minimal reconstitutions of the Mille Plateaux camp and Voigt brothers. What sets it apart is its slick, centrifugal employment of ostensibly acoustic timbres, from the prepared piano rumble underpinning the factory-belt beat of ‘Reflux’ to the almost Hassell-esque water drum intonations keeping ‘Spool’ bobbing along, and the spatial, metronomic guiro squelch on ‘Blend’.

Over the album’s 11 tracks, Yokota conveys an overarching sense of urban vastness, peace, and ominous anticipation, with ambient reveries like ‘Fiber’ playing like susurrating signals in quiet and dense urban spaces; humming telegraph lines over empty Naka-meguro parking lots and the distant sound of surging superhighways. ‘Stitch’ begins with a vacant, questing pad, transfixed as if by the hypnotic twitching of the Tokyo horizon seen from a high and distant point, before descending into a subterranean network of synapse-tickling digital interference.
  The disarmingly groovy shuffler ‘Circular’ looms like a spectral figure between seas of heads on the metro or violet dusk over a glittering skyline, while the persistent mechanoid clank of ‘Metabolic’ summons entropic scenes: hoards of skittish commuters, the constant drone of office telephones and pings of overworked appliances.

On the otherwise-threadbare jacket of the original CD, Yokota included the following unattributed quote - “Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties”. The loom is one of the earliest pieces of functioning machinery in existence, and on this album, Yokota employs thread as a pertinent analogy for his musical process, weaving strands of musical influence and scraps of sonic fabric into a tapestry that is far more than the sum of its constituent parts. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, he taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.











IMAGE 1983-1998





Volume 1 - Album 2










Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.




A1: Kaiten Mokuba  
A2: Tayutafu  
A3: Fukuru no Yume  
A4: Wani Natte 
A5: Sakashima 
A6: Morino Gakudan

B1: Nisemono no Uta 
B2: Daremoshiranai Chisanakuni 
B3: Kwano Hotorino Kinoshitade  
B4: Yumekui Kobito 
B5: Amai Niyoi 
B6: Enogu 
B7: Amanogawa


Including an essay from Robert Harris in the liner notes....


....’Listening on repeat it’s pretty hard to identify where the early 80’s become the late 90’s. A musical manifestation of time, not as a line, linear, but past , present and future co-existing together in the same place’....







Image (1993-1998) is the second release on Susumu Yokota’s Skintone label, and is a deeply personal, pensive and autobiographical sequence of organ, guitar and tape studies, released at a time when the majority of his output landed squarely in the house and techno spheres. It represents an unearthing of, and desire to return to his early experiments in ghostly pop formations, post-punk timbres and melody-led abstraction. The opening five tracks were recorded in 1983-4, and the remainder were devised as a continuation of those tracks between 1997 and 1998, when the Skintone label was launched and Yokota was taking tentative steps towards a more pared-back, tranquil and nostalgic soundworld. 

The tracks recorded in 1983-4, around the time Yokota was recording his debut techno offering for Sven Väths Harthouse label, have a spectral and fragmentary air. ‘Kaiten Mokuba’ opens with the wheezing pall of a tipsy pipe organ, rocking to and fro in a tender and pensive opening fanfare, before the disarmingly pretty, folksy guitar ambedo of ‘Tayutafu’ unexpectedly grounds the listener in the same warm and oneiric terrain as some of Bert Jansch’s solo acoustic works. 
‘Fukuro No Yume’ follows, a return to the dusty fairground organ nostalgia of the opener, before the jangly guitar pointillism of ‘Wani Natte’ immediately lays bare his Durutti Column influence, also calling to mind the later work of ambient songstress Colleen. ‘Sakashima’ brings the first chapter to a close with its purring static washes and tentative organ pulses, distorted and gated to the brink of recognition.

The latter two-thirds of the album, conceived as an escape route when the weight of expectation to produce functional house and techno records was mounting, is an audibly more accomplished but similarly frugal and meditative throwback to his earlier experiments with timbre and emotive minimalism. The arcing e-piano motifs and staccato strings of ‘Morino Gakudan’ lay the foundations for much of his later work on the Skintone label, and the cooing vocal intermissions over a bed of churning rhodes motifs on ‘Kawano Hotorino Kinoshitade’ sound uncannily like an offcut of 1999’s pivotal Sakura album.
 ‘Amai Niyoi’ answers ‘Wani Natte’ in its sparkling, 80s inflected guitar ostinati, adding charming melodica and droplets of bell-like synthwork, and the soothing closer ‘Amanogawa’ flies the closest to Yokota’s dance oeuvre, with wavering voices and supple melodies flitting around soft sine syncopations, prefacing the dissected trance sketches of producers like Lorenzo Senni by a decade.

The cover of the album shows a twig-like structure, branching off into curlicues and framed by Yokota to preserve a degree of ambiguity and strangeness. Presumably a close up of one of Yokota’s Marcel Duchamp-inspired assemblages, it is perfectly analogous to the music, which zooms in on sonic artefacts, acousmatically prising them from their sources and revelling in their stark, fundamental beauty. The voice of an organ is mangled through chains of effects, amplifying its oddly human wheeze and flutter, and delicately spliced vocal apparitions materialise at the back of the soundstage. With these early sketches, Yokota demonstrates his unparalleled command of timbre and pacing; every loop is given breathing space, and the music brims with humanity. 







SAKURA




Volume 1 - Album 3










Yokota's ambient masterpiece that set the world alight with it's dazzling and immersive transcendent beauty.





A1. Saku  
A2. Uchu Tanjyo 
A3. Hagoromo

B1. Genshi 
B2. Gekkoh  
B3. Kirakiraboshi

C1. Kodomotachi. 
C2. Hisen  
C3. Tobiume

D1. Naminote 
 D2. Shinsen  
D3. Azukiiro no Kaori


Including an essay by Martyn Peperrel in the liner notes....


......“If you look or listen close enough, you’ll recognise the same splendour and harmony Yokota-san was reaching for everywhere. Year after year, the cherry blossoms continue to bloom and fall, making way for new leaves and foreshadowing the warm summer months ahead. Similarly, twenty three years after it was first released, Sakura continues to offer listeners a way to understand the inevitability of decay within a never-ending stream of change. It’s a bittersweet beauty, one emotionally heightened by the poignant sadness that all things must one day end.”......






Without doubt the most loved and lauded entry in Susumu Yokota’s catalogue, Sakura dropped on the Skintone label in 1999, before it debuted on the UK’s Leaf Label for European distribution in 2000, by which time it was already a huge success, going on to sell tens of thousands of copies through word of mouth alone. Sakura was the first fully realised statement of intent for Yokota’s recently christened Skintone label, a forum for sounds inspired by the loose, improvisatory atmosphere at his club nights of the same name in Tokyo’s Club LUST. Sandwiched between two propulsive techno and house outings on Sublime Records, Sakura follows on from Image 1983-1998 and Magic Thread, carving out a crystalline channel of blissful ambience flowing alongside Yokota’s more club-centric output. In a 2002 interview with Bim Ricketson, Yokota said that “It feels natural for me to do both dance and ambient, it’s a balance that exists within me.” and it is this flexibility and functional non-duality which gives Sakura much of its ephemeral intrigue and beauty. 

Over the course of its 12 tracks, Sakura unravels like cascades of petals falling from the eponymous cherry blossom trees. In the opener ‘Saku’, a blinkered guitar and e-piano motif stutters in endless cycles, fading in and out either end of the track as if mimicking the relentless reset of the seasons. 
‘Tobiume’ revolves around surging currents of warm clav and glacial house pianos, ricocheting out over the rolling loop beds. ‘Uchu Tanjyo’ steps out into more humid, crepuscular terrain with its clattering hand percussion, snatches of ebullient spoken phrases and distant, breathy flutes landing us firmly in a similar microclimate to Jon Hassell’s fourth world heat-haze. ‘Hagoromo’ brings us back to the swaying reveries of the first two tracks, with undulating, contrapuntal harp figures eventually elapsing into Riley-esque rhodes canons, before standout track ‘Genshi’ juxtaposes Yokota’s familiar humming e-piano coils with a plosive 909 kick and oneiric bells, channelling his washier, more dub techno-adjacent efforts, as well as Tangerine Dream’s pointillist synth meditations and Steve Reich’s proto-rik minimalism.

‘Hisen’ is another curveball, built on the foundation of an intensely phased trip hop groove, with saccharine violin arpeggios and plaintive rhodes harmonisations, while ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’, perhaps the most arrestingly beautiful track on the album, revolves around an axis of cavernous, resonant - you guessed it - e-piano, with snatches of mellifluous vocal riding the thermals. 
The desolate, far-off city sparkle of ‘Kodomotachi’ sounds eerily like a prequel to Burial’s classic ‘In McDonalds’, while ‘Naminote’ revolves around a splashy, driving Chick Corea sample, evoking the entropic scrambles of Shibuya’s namesake crossing, before the soporific ‘Shinsen’ and glistening melodic arcs of ‘Kirakiraboshi’ evoke the last of the falling Sakura blossoms.

In 2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu of The Revenant fame approached Yokota to produce the soundtrack for his 2006 psychological drama Babel. Although Yokota could not accept this commission because of his deteriorating health, the centrepiece from Sakura, ‘Gekkoh’ was included in the soundtrack. Yokota had long harboured ambitions to compose for film, telling Ricketson that he would “like to work with Jean Pierre Jeunet and Vinsent Giaro and if it’s possible, to work with an old director, Parajanov”. Perhaps it is the seething undercurrents of emotion in Yokota’s work which gives it its cinematic quality- he had expressed an intention to “express ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) through music”, and throughout Sakura, the affect fluctuates between profound tranquillity, hesitation, melancholy, and joy with ease, addressing the fickle nature of human emotion, while transcending the inclination to label moods entirely.



GRINNING CAT




Volume 1 - Album 4









One of Yokota's most loved releases that explores the intersection of jazz, new age ambience and a world of found sound and samples.





A1: I Imagine  
A2: King Dragonfly  
A3: Card Nation  
A4: Balloon in a Cage

B1: Lapis Lazuli   
B2: Cherry Blossom  
B3: Sleepy Eye

C1: Love Bird  C2: Fearful Dream C3: Tears of A Poet
D1: Flying Cat D2: So Red. D3: Lost Child


Including an essay by Wyndham Wallace in the liner notes...


.... “Imagination....’ Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat advised in the pages of Alice in Wonderland ‘...is the only weapon in the war with reality’. Grinning Cat couldn’t feel much less like combat, but, whether one relates to it intellectually or instinctively, emotional socery - always a great stimulator of the imagination - is critical to its charms. Shifting styles accross tracks and, moreover, within tracks, it exhibits a carefree disregard for conventions, creating an environment in which to revel while offering compelling triumphant proof of its fictional precursor’s doctrine’ ......










Although one of Susumu Yokota’s most stylistically varied works in the Skintone catalogue, Grinning Cat (2001) revolves largely around the piano- both sampled and seemingly played by Yokota himself. Across its thirteen deeply evocative tracks, he runs the gamut of emotions, stylistic hallmarks and timbres, albeit using a narrow palette of sound sources. A follow-up to the much loved Sakura, Grinning Cat represented an amoebic, energised and joyful chapter in Yokota’s career, where his recent successes and a move into a larger studio in Tokyo’s suburbs afforded him time to process his influences and refine his techniques across a multitude of styles, opening up countless potential directions for his work in the years to come.

While 1999’s Sakura seemed to draw heavily on the concept of ‘mono no aware’ or impermanence; a national melancholy associated with beauty and impermanence characterised by the meagre couple of weeks in which Japan’s cherry blossoms emerge, Grinning Cat latches on to the present moment with glee and inquisitiveness, fluctuating in tempo, rhythmic structure and arrangement in a way poignantly reminiscent of the chaos and delight of everyday life. 

“Last summer,” Yokota wrote, “I started to live with my girlfriend and also three cats: mother cat, Tabasa, her son cat, Bindi, and her daughter black cat, Noa. We all played together like having parties every day at home. The everyday life with cats is like a fairytale, and also it was like I met the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland. In my works, I always create philosophy and 'childlike' images. This album Grinning Cat came into existence because of having this wonderful life”. It is this preoccupation with everyday wonder and mystery, closer to the Buddhist concept of ‘yuugen’, which characterises Grinning Cat; a suggestion of profound beauty, mystery and joy in memory and imagination. 

‘I imagine’ sets the tone for an immensely warm and rewarding listen, with tessellating, prepared piano-like loops soon entangling themselves with his signature vocal glossolalia and gently warping, percussive interjections, before the razor-sharp break and plosive ASMR handclaps of ‘King Dragonfly’ drop the listener back down to earth in a flurry of organic colour and light.

 ‘Card Nation’ follows on seamlessly, maintaining the pressure with cavernous Japanese percussion, breathy hisses and an airy, gothic atmosphere, evoking Future Sound of London’s mid-nineties soundscapes. The aptly named ‘Sleepy Eye’, a gentle tape loop lullaby, is swiftly chased by the humid cloud-forest resonance of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and the jagged, Philip Glass-esque woodwind constructions of ‘Balloon In The Cage’. 
Standout centrepiece ‘Cherry Blossom’ sees Yokota return to the hazy dub techno plateaus of Magic Thread, with submerged kickdrums and gauzy pads, before the omnipresent piano enters in naïve, plaintive cascades, and the stacked flurries of piano motif in ‘Love Bird’ evoke started flocks taking to the skies. he psychotropic 40s trouble-in-paradise film score moment ‘Fearful Dream’ leads us tumbling through spidering alleyways towards the stunning, smoky loucheness of the subterranean Gentle People-style exotica hybrid ‘Tears of a Poet’. 

‘So Red’ continues in a tropical-gothic vein, with ominous lap-steel and patient, seductive drum loops, and the shimmering strings, plinky tuned percussion and splashy kitwork of ‘Flying Cat’, one of the most unabashedly joyful and bubbly entries in Yokota’s discography, lead us into the tentative, glitchy closer ‘Lost Child’.

Sentimental without being schmaltzy, joyful without being saccharine, Grinning Cat sees Yokota at his most playful and experimental, channelling moments of transitory wonder and jubilation, and opening up a sonic environment in which we can romp and play. 







WILL




Volume 1 – Album 5









Yokota's most upbeat and playful release on the Skintone label. A wild melange of bumping beats, freestyle samples and esoteric goodness.




A1: Level 21   
A2: Alpine Nation

B1: Red Door. 
B2: Illusion River

C1: Pegasus Man 
C2: Black Sea

D1: Pony Tail. 
D2: Rabbit Earring



Including an essay by Ben Eshmade in the liner notes...

... “This album is still a strong statement of absurdity, perversity and humour from a composer who was by his mid-career. crackling and buzzing with electricity of infinite ideas. Here are stories he told in sound, inspired by energy, sweat, smell and recollected glamour of a hazy, lost dance floor”...








Will is in many senses, an anomaly in the Skintone catalogue. On inspection, the artwork echoes the monochromatic minimalism of his previous effort of the same year, Grinning Cat, with its trompe l'oeil horizontal bars revealing a hazy italic rendering of the word Will in the bottom right-hand corner. This canny visual trickery also characterises the sonic imprint of the record, which shares the playfulness and jubilation of Grinning Cat, but looks more to the soulful, sashaying instrumentation on its spiritual predecessors 1998 and 1999 on Tokyo’s Sublime Records. It is, in a way, strange that it didn’t drop on Sublime, but given Yokota’s withdrawal from the proscriptive and commercialised Tokyo techno scene in 1998, it makes sense that he would unleash any future dance music efforts on his own label; an ode to his legendary Skintone party, where friends would play a wide and loose range of deep, filter, french and oddball house sounds of the time. It is into this world which Will is launched, with its structures and sample choices slotting it in with the early 00s house and broken beat zeitgeist.

What sets it apart however, is Yokota’s mastery of timbre and juxtaposition, with crystal cascades of acoustic trickery riding organic, rolling drum programming and bold rearrangements of the conventional mixer levels on many house records of the time.
 The shortest of Yokota’s Skintone releases, Will loses no momentum and immediacy across its seven, six-minute tracks. ‘Level 21’ blends parallel rhodes action with dreamy, technicolour trails of square-wave synth and churning breaks, before the off-kilter chug of ‘Alpine Nation’ brings us into more intrinsically ‘skintone’ territory with its detuned guitar garbles and disembodied vocal fragments. ‘Red Door’ is a washy, broken bossa in the tradition of Alex Attias and the early Hospital records catalogue, replete with orchestra-hall one shots and coiling conga rolls, and ‘Illusion River’ is a mellow, Parrish-esque shuffler, juxtaposing blunted rhodes chords with warbling choirs in unmistakably Susumu style. 


‘Pegasus Man’ continues on an intensely groovy broken beat tip, flying at times, dangerously close to buddha bar lounge sensibility, but steered away by Yokota’s intentionally fractious sampling style, before ‘Black Sea’ taps into an early 00s Photek-adjacent sound palette, with imperious organ pulses and distant washes of oneiric pad easing the listener back into the smoke. The unabashed disco house heater ‘Pony Tail’ - sampling Bohannon’s high voltage boogie classic ‘Let’s Start The Dance’ no less - ruthlessly surges into the more pensive, abstract closing ditty ‘Rabbit Earring’, fusing rambling piano figures with buoyant soul breaks and flirtatious vocal choppage.

Initially only appearing as a limited, vinyl-only release, it is clear that Will was intended as a low-key and cathartic return to Yokota’s bread and butter- house music. Perhaps a dubplate intended to soundtrack the small hours at Ebisu’s intimate LUST club, where his friends would gather and share recent musical discoveries.

 Its eight tightly wound, cyclic grooves certainly conjure images of rambling, neon-lit Tokyo alleyways and late-night shenanigans, while also maintaining an air of cosiness and familiarity, as if they were composed with a certain room or soundsystem in mind. Piano is a recurring theme, entering the mix in a way more readily associable with Larry Heard or Kenny Larkin’s groove alchemy than the choppy impressionism of Reich and Glass referenced on Grinning Cat. If Grinning Cat was a playful exploration of memory and hazy jubilation, Will is a cathartic surrender to the groove, intended for the feet as much as the mind.



THE BOY AND THE TREE




Volume 1 - Album 6








Yokota at his most enigmatic and profound. A deeply psychedelic voyage into a world of ritual and magic.




A1: The Colour of Pomegranates   
A2: Live Echo  
A3: Fairy Link

B1: Secret Garden  
B2: Grass, Tree and Stone. 
B3: Rose Necklace

C1: Plateau on Plateau  
C2: Red Swan  
C3: Beans

D1: Future Tiger  
D2: Threads Lead to Heaven 
 D3: Blood and Snow


Including an essay by Carl Griffin in the liner notes....

... “As we all now know, the prodigiously prolific Sumumu Yokota never repeated himself, as was his wont and as was the nature of his searching appetite for new creative impetus. In the weeks leading-up to the making of this extraordinary album Yokota had taken a restorative and perhaps revelatory trip to Yakushima Island.”...







In the weeks leading up to the studio sessions which birthed Susumu Yokota’s 2002 album The Boy And The Tree, he visited Japan’s Yakushima Island, an outstandingly beautiful world heritage site off the southern tip of Japan, jutting out into the East China Sea. As well as a beach with protected status as a loggerhead turtle nesting site, the island is scored by a deep, lush and ancient ravine, The ‘Shiratani Unsuikyo’. Nestled in the gorge is a much mythologised ancient tree, the potentially 7000-year old ‘Jōmon Sugi’. It is these sloping, verdant forests where Hayao Miyazaki found inspiration for his 1997 epic Princess Mononoke, a groundbreaking anime addressing the conflict between the rampant greed and destructive force of humanity, and the stoic, mysterious fragility of nature. It is no secret that Yokota was a fan of this film, and it is clear from the work he created in the wake of his visit that he was hugely inspired by the breathtaking majesty of the island.

This fleeting immersion in nature lent the album a profound introspection and mystery, and the its twelve tracks unfold in dream sequence, each drifting seamlessly into the next while still managing to steer the listener in myriad directions, from eerie butoh atmospheres, to ebullient raga, to desolate, cavernous chanson.  The Boy And The Tree is definitely one of, if not the most, visually evocative and cinematic Yokota releases, and where Grinning Cat or Will were visually and thematically shackled to the electric hustle of Tokyo, it looks instead to the revelatory quietness of the rolling hills and sweeping coastlines of Yakushima, a place of refuge which prompted Yokota to extract himself “a few times a week” from his suburban home to follow in the ancient, winding arteries of the forest. Yokota once told music journalist Bim Rickson “Walking amongst the big trees, I can hear my heartbeat and the echoes of the earth”, and on The Boy And The Tree, these forest resonances are audible, unfurling in a strikingly organic way as if Yokota is merely documenting the soundscape of one of his forest rambles. 

It is ostensibly his most Japanese-sounding album, from the woven, resounding ronin warrior cries in ‘Live Echo’ to the blissful pentatonic washes over ‘Rose Necklace’ and the warbling noh chants and ceremonial bells on ‘Red Swan’.  This inkling of nostalgic pride in the ancient arts of Japan is offset, however, by a gentle new-age utopianism. Throughout the album, Yokota unselfconsciously incorporates samples from global musical traditions; see the pulsing earth raga of ‘Grass, Tree and Stone’, or the driving gamelan phrases of ‘Secret Garden’, for instance, which still manage to steer well clear of any patronising ‘10 hours of zen garden meditation sounds’ atmospheres. 
The aspect of Yokota’s art which set him apart from many artists in his milieu wasn’t as much the raw and well trodden subject matter itself, but more the way it was treated, with a unique tastefulness and knack for unexpected juxtaposition.

The wafting strains of reed pipe and cricket-like ambience on ‘Beans’ could fly close to vapid lounge atmospheres in the wrong hands, but Yokota splices the samples in a way which preserves their essence while maintaining an acousmatic mystique; short phrases loop in increasingly mechanical cycles, making the listener question their provenance in the same way a word loses its meaning when repeatedly spoken.  

Just like Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime, The Boy And The Tree is at once a subtle and quietly stunning ode to the fragile majesty of nature, a reverent cry for humanity to rally and protect what is essential to our survival, and an intoxicating homage to the spirit in all earthly things.




   

LAPUTA




Volume 1 - Album 7








The mystical world of Laputa is perhaps Yokota's most challenging work but immeasurably rewarding. Beguiling and bewitching in equal measure.





A1: Rising Sun  
A2: Lost Ring  
A3: Gong Gong Gong  
A4: Grey Piano

B1: Iconic Air   
B2: Light of The Sun  
B3: Trip Eden

C1: 23 Degrees Dream 
 C2: Hidden Love  
C3: True Story  
C4: Dragon Place

D1: I Am Flying  
D2: Dizzy Echo  
D3: Heart By Heart  
D4: Hyper On Hyper

Including an essay by Richard Norris in the liner notes...

... “There is a building up and breaking down of the elements within the mix, in a careful and spacious construction. Something that appears to be far in the distance can gradually, or suddenly, break through front and centre. There are many styles of music that have been called deep listening - the term is even applied to a way of listening itelf. Laputa is a fine example of depth in music. It can also be heard as a ceremony, and as a trip..”...







Susumu Yokota’s Laputa (2003) is perhaps his most challenging, foreboding and perplexing body of work. Over fifteen undulating sonic fugue states, he guides listeners round a liminal world, made up of familiar materials but formed in a way defying all laws of perspective and physics. Like the impossible perspective of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, background murmurings give way to almost uncomfortably foregrounded chattering, and one perceived soundstage segues into another impossible tableau of sonic apparitions, some recognisable in form, but all boldly decontextualised and arranged in expertly cluttered amalgams. The twisting, ‘penguin pool at London Zoo’ form on the cover also alludes to this Escher-esque collision of sonic angles, its arcing petal-like plateau spiralling into oblivion and calling to mind Le Corbusier’s 1958 Philips Pavilion, housing Iannis Xenakis and Varèse’s similarly disembodied sequence of sonic artefacts, Poème Électronique. Although possibly Yokota’s first entirely beatless work, it does not share the capital A ambient nature of Eno’s forays into discreet music, or the soothing soundscapes more readily associable with The Boy and The Tree, his previous effort on the Skintone label. 

Instead, it rewards deep and intentioned listening; watching sounds and textures pass by in a seductive dream sequence. Not one to stick on while entertaining friends or spring cleaning. 

‘Rising Sun’ gently sets the tone for a vivid trip, with its deep, resonant monastic drones, band-passed signal interference and eerie operatic wails, before the antigravitational tone float of ‘Lost Ring’ leads the listener into the cosmic ping pong match of the onomatopoeic ‘gong gong gong’, a spiritual prequel to composers like Alexi Baris and Ulla Straus’ expansive audio patchworks. The mellower ‘Iconic Air’ fuses a plodding, space-lounge bassline with metallic dub techno sound FX and overtone atmospheres, and the nearly avant-pop abstraction on ‘Light of The Sun’ leads us into the plinky, isolationist centrepiece ‘Grey Piano’, channelling Arvo Pärt’s austere tintinnabulations. ‘7 Degrees Dream’ guides us back towards deep-space cocktail party ambience before the sinister, cinematic warning tones of ‘Hidden Love’ preempt the bitonal chaos of ‘Trip Eden’. The borderline cheesy, questing synths of ‘True Story’ are soon undermined by mischievous, formant-shifted vocalisations, and colossal synth stalactites glisten on the aptly named ‘Dragon Place’. 

The almost disconcertingly gentle ‘I am flying’ eases us into soporific bliss, before ‘Dizzy Echo’, ‘Heart By Heart’, and the percussive stride of ‘Hyper on Hyper’ end the album on a flustered, breathless note, dropping us back to reality with a thud and a cosmic pat on the back.

Another factor setting Laputa apart from the eternal chin-stroke of both ambient and avant garde camps is its use of unflinchingly synthetic sounds and textures, as well as pop detritus. Take ‘Lost Ring’ for instance, where soaring, Jimmy Smith-style rotary hammond licks circle overhead, crying out in a vacuum otherwise permeated by mostly uncanny, humanoid chattering, or ‘23 Degrees Dream’, where 80s city-pop synth lines, clumsy blues guitar twangs, and shoegazy vocal mantras bob in the void. This aspect of Yokota’s music speaks to his profound mastery and appreciation of the twin disciplines of popular and ‘art’ music, a dichotomy which a handful of critics dourly and categorically failed to understand on the release of his first non-dance efforts. Sucks to be them. Laputa is the sound of Yokota casually shrugging off all expectations and artistic inhibitions.


Symbol




Volume 2 - Album 1

Regarded by Yokota as his masterpiece and rightly so. An endlessly inventive mixture of classical and contemporary forms.






A1: Long Long Silk Bridge  
A2: Purple Rose Minuet  
A3: Traveler In Wonderland   
A4: Song Of The Sleeping Forest  
A5: The Plateau Which The Zephyr Of Flora Occupies  
A6: Fairy Dance Of Twinkle And Shadow


B1: Flaming Love And Destiny  
B2: The Dying Black Swan.  
B3: Blue Sky And Yellow Sunflower   
B4: Capriccio And The Innovative Composer.  
B5: I Close The Door Upon Myself  
B6: Symbol Of Life, Love, And Aesthetics.   
B5: Music From The Lake Surface




Including an essay by Tsutomu Noda in the liner notes....

... “During the production of the album he explained that he listened mostly to Moodymann’s Black Mahogany and Silence in the Secret Garden albums. In his studio he knitted together Detroit’s soulful music with fragments of classical music, whilst looking at a collection of radical late 19th centuary anti-modernist european art”...





Distant Sounds Of Summer




Volume 2 - Album 2

 Without doubt one of Yokota's most beautiful and easily accessible productions. Haunting, majestic and timeless.




A1 Deep In Mist  
A2: Water's Edge 
A3: Path Fades Into Forest 

B1: Lit By Moonlight 
B2 Brook and Burn  
B3: Sentiero



C1: Clear Space 
 C2: Reflections And Shadows  

D1: Distant Sounds Of Summer 
 D2: Floating Moon



Including an essay by Nick Luscombe in the liner notes...

... “ Distant Sounds Of Summer, like so much of Susumu Yokota's output, is also musically so generous, where every sound and each space between is there for a reason. It is also music designed to be loved. And maybe some things in life are not about having to work out the whys are wherefores. Perhaps allowing space, to stand back and to be present and unquestioning in the face of something special and unique is better than knowledge and understanding.”...



Wonder Waltz




Volume 2 - Album 3








 
Yokota at his most adventurous and sprawling and enchanting featuring an array of guest vocalists. A treasure chest of musical marvels.




A1: 1000 Wing Beats Per Second
A2:My Energy
A3:Capital Of Daisy
A4:Siva Dance

B1:Pegasus 150
B2:Don’t Go Sleep
B3:Merrygoround


C1:Robed Heart
C2:Strma A Uska
C3:Eternity Is The Beginning OF The End
C4:L'Etranger

D1:Rainbow Dust
D2:Your Shining Darkness
D3:Holy Ground



Including an essay by Gavin O’Shea in the liner notes...

... “Your intitial realisation is that waltz time is dreamtime. Why didnt we think of that before. And not the dreams of midsummer but the real ones of the over-slept afternoon. The complex and vivid, the troubled and slippery. As the tracks proceed the mastery of this device audibly gallops off in all directions. Out of the Susumu sunshine on the Yokota plain, once again guests in his landscape.”....